George Orwell

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been, or can be successfully carried out, without corporal punishment.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Four legs good two legs bad.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it, consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults in a child's eyes is that the child is usually looking upwards and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress the other side more or less for reaction.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.